LGBT activists are terrified that South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard will follow his legislature’s lead in refusing to succumb to the high-pressure conformity tactics they’ve used to cow many other politicians. If Daugaard signs House Bill 1008, his state will be the first to secure men, women, and young children’s rights to use locker rooms and bathrooms free from the eyes and presence of people who are biologically of the opposite sex.

So LGBT groups are spewing forth even more of their usual overhyped invective. The laughably named Human Rights Campaign has been sending forth feverish press releases imperiously demanding that men be allowed to shower in the same area as little girls, lest children be endangered. Yes, really: “These appalling proposals [to keep men out of little girls’ showers and bathrooms] would compromise the safety and well-being of the young people we all have the duty and obligation to support and protect.” A little more self-awareness, please.

More likely HRC’s urgent tone reflects the fact that many state lawmakers have this year introduced bills intended to protect women and children from finding themselves undressed next to a person of the opposite sex, with no recourse. More than two-dozen of these bills have surfaced in the past six months in states including Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin. The spike in such bills is a direct response to the Obama administration last year forcing public schools in Illinois and Virginia to put boys in girls’ dressing, bathroom, and shower facilities, or lose federal K-12 funds. The administration will soon release a “hit list” of religious colleges that similarly protect sexual privacy.

Transgender: A Bridge Too Far

Many lawmakers find forcing little girls to undress next to men and boys too intolerant for even their heavily conditioned tastes, as this report from a debate in Indiana shows: “The ‘T’ (in LGBT) is a stumbling block at the moment,” [Senate President David] Long said…Democrats refused to support a proposal that did not include civil rights protections for transgender Hoosiers. But Republicans refused to support a proposal that included them.” LGBT activists’ refusal to compromise in red-state Indiana on forcibly injecting transgender men into women and children’s bathrooms this month tanked a broader special-rights bill for a stack of their preferred sexual minorities.

‘The “T” (in LGBT) is a stumbling block at the moment,’ [Senate President David] Long said.’

These lawmakers’ common-sense stance was totally non-controversial about a year ago. Now all of a sudden schools that have boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are being propagandized as “extremist.” Why the rush? Because this logical extension of the LGBT agenda is so obviously anti-reality that to succeed they must push it through, fast and furiously. In this case, the method is to smear the legislators and the vast majority of South Dakotans they represent, claiming they are “attacking transgender children.”

Nothing is further from the truth. South Dakotan legislators and their compatriots across the country are standing up, both to protect the vulnerable women and children of America who comprise a majority of the population and to protect rights for everyone that are far more important than forcibly rearranging private spaces to accommodate feelings that are probably best resolved through psychotherapy, not enabling self- and other-abuse.

Here’s how these “bathroom bills” show that the LGBT political agenda ultimately degrades human rights, suppresses scientific truths, and ends government by consent.

The Fundamental Rights to Free Speech and Association

If the LGBT lobby had an accurate vision statement, it would probably read something like this: “No one shall speak freely to another human being.” If that sounds a bit odd to you, then consider how ferociously the LGBT lobby has been fighting free expression.

It has become quickly clear that the LGBT lobby was merely using Americans’ love of freedom against us.

On the heels of the Supreme Court Obergefell decision that forced states to legally sanction same-sex marriage, we have seen a flurry of censorship laws disguised as sexual orientation and gender identity non-discrimination (SOGI) laws. They’re the sort of laws that can result in a $250,000 fine in New York if you “misgender” a transgender person. They can also shut down your business and bank accounts if you politely recuse yourself from applying your artistic talents—whether in flower arranging, cake designing, or photography—to celebrating a same-sex wedding.

The vitriolic reaction of the LGBT lobby to honesty from Americans about their consciences, religious beliefs, scientific knowledge, and political stances shows that their agenda boils down to shutting down free speech. This sounds counter-intuitive. After all, the media and Hollywood conditioned us in pre-Obergefell days to see gay rights and transgenderism as an expansion of free expression, certainly not its death knell. LGBT agitation and propaganda trained us to see it all as a matter of simply allowing people to be their authentic selves. Not as a tool to enforce conformity of thought on all of us, thereby erasing authenticity.

But it has become quickly clear that the LGBT lobby was merely using Americans’ love of freedom against us. They were packaging speech bans and economic conscription inside the stars and stripes. Their favored laws prioritize the ability of a tiny minority to compel everyone else to affirm their desires over everyone’s ability to discuss the issue honestly. Remember: transgender folks comprise 0.03 percent of the U.S. population, while children and adult women comprise some 62 percent.

We all know that disagreeing with someone does not mean hating them. It means that an issue is open for discussion.

When put that way, most Americans will disagree. So they have to be barred from discussion with smears of “bigotry” and “hate.” But we all know that disagreeing with someone does not mean hating them. It means that an issue is open for discussion, that’s all. If it cannot be open for discussion, we have now entered a totalitarian state in which people’s private thoughts and actions are now grounds for political control.

The horrors repression at this level sparks are precisely why the rights to free speech and association are enshrined in our Constitution, while rights to others’ good opinion and cooperation are not. Free speech is more important than protecting feelings, because without the former a free society cannot exist.

Children’s Right to Be Secure from Exploitation

HRC press releases rather absurdly insist that bills like those in South Dakota are “vile” and “serve[] no other purpose than to directly attack transgender children and could have catastrophic consequences.”

LGBT advocates have shown themselves especially callous about the rights of women and children to feel secure, even as they cynically wield the tiny population of so-called transgender children.

Wrong. State and national constitutions already protect these rights, and Americans have responded to the demands of transgendered children’s handlers by bending over backward to accommodate them as far as possible without also violating the privacy and speech rights of their fellow citizens. We have schools in numerous states granting private bathroom and showering facilities to transgender children (and adults), accommodating their requests to play on sports teams of the opposite sex, and shushing up all the other children to protect one child’s feelings.

If LGBT advocates were really concerned about “singling [transgender children] out from their peers,” as HRC insisted the South Dakota bill does, they would not push these children into pre-puberty cross-sex hormones and demand that parents encourage them to dress and act abnormally. They would not call for and get the heads of prominent and respected doctors who merely note that research shows the best care for transgender children does not push them into opposite-sex behaviors and chemicals.

LGBT advocates have shown themselves especially callous about the rights of women and children to feel secure, even as they cynically wield the tiny population of so-called transgender children as sympathetic excuses to enact their anti-science, anti-speech, and anti-empathy agenda. It can be possible for individual schools and public places to protect both gender-confused individuals and the rest of society, typically by granting both private places to conduct their private business.

They don’t want good-faith compromises. They want dominance.

But that’s not good enough for LGBT advocates, because they don’t want good-faith compromises. They want dominance. They benefit from not only expanding the number of gender-confused children so they can multiply their legal beachheads, but also from instantly politicizing each child’s case to prevent families from privately dealing with these conflicts in a manner that may provide wholeness by coming to peace with the biological sex of the child in question, as the vast majority of successful transgender-child cases do. In other words, LGBT advocates (whose agenda and tactics many homosexual and transgender people do not support) score political points by exploiting and damaging not only non-transgender children but also the very children they pretend to champion.

The Right to Act with Authenticity and Integrity

South Dakota has another bill, House Bill 1107, that is aptly titled “An Act to Ensure Government Nondiscrimination in Matters of Religious Beliefs and Moral Convictions.” In other words, if you have serious beliefs about sex, marriage, and children, you needn’t be forced to perform acts that violate your conscience or totally gag yourself in fear of being fired.

South Dakota lawmakers are issuing a friendly reminder that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of belief and freedom of speech for everybody.

You can hold ideas about marriage that nearly all of the world’s major religions teach and that 99 percent of the world’s population accepted until approximately 18 months ago when—voila!—the media declared that the masses have changed their collective mind. Or you can hold to the anti-science LGBT diktat that obliterates the meaning of male or female for everybody on the planet (because it insists everybody’s sex is arbitrarily “assigned at birth”). Both perspectives would be protected.

That’s called freedom of conscience. Protecting it allows people to publicly act the same as they privately think. That’s called integrity, and authenticity. The LGBT agenda instead pressures people to act like hypocrites because they fear losing social status. South Dakota lawmakers are issuing a friendly reminder that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of belief and freedom of speech for everybody, not just LGBT folks and their allies.

The Transgender Agenda Is Anti-Science

The heart of South Dakota’s HB 1107 states the following:

the state may not take any discriminatory action against a person, wholly or partially, on the basis that the person believes, speaks, or acts in accordance with a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction that; Marriage is or should only be recognized as the union of one man and one woman; Sexual relations are properly reserved to marriage; or The terms male or man and female or woman refer to distinct and immutable biological sexes that are determined by anatomy and genetics by the time of birth.

The HRC seeks to make expressing all of the above beliefs illegal. Here’s the kicker: that ultimately includes any statement in which you would recognize the biological reality of your ownbody.

The LGBT agenda is nothing less than a war on reality. Essentially, it requires that everybody get with a legal package deal that insists human beings are neither male nor female. The transgender piece of it absolutely requires this. Remember, it’s based on the premise that your “gender” (which is a linguistic, not scientific, term) is arbitrarily “assigned at birth,” never a fact of physical reality, such as the basic truth that all human beings, except the tiny percentage with genetic anomalies, have either XX or XY chromosomes imprinted on every single cell of their bodies.

There is no logic to implementing the transgender agenda, because it inherently requires irrationally rejecting the simple, biological reality that men and women’s bodies are quite different, and that nothing can make a genetically normal person transmogrify either into the other sex or into the very small number of people whose bodies, due to genetic defects, include aspects of both sexes.

A War On Government by Consent

The headline of a HRC press release reads: “South Dakota on the Verge of Becoming First State in Nation to Pass Law Attacking Trans Children.” The quote from the HRC president reads: “This legislation is disturbing, shocking, and outrageous. It serves no other purpose than to directly attack transgender children and could have catastrophic consequences. The Senate must stop this vile legislation dead in its tracks.”

These are the smears of political correctness, which are intended to modify your language, behavior, and thoughts.

Disturbing. Shocking. Outrageous. Vile. Really? These are the smears of political correctness, which are intended to modify your language, behavior, and thoughts. This is exactly how gas lighters operate on their victims. Without suppressing dissent, the entire transgender project would die in its tracks, just like any other cult project. The LGBT lobby knows this.

Instead, it can only operate within a Stalinist-style framework. It’s totally about agitprop. Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen laid out the whole strategy for the LGBT agenda in their 1989 book “After the Ball.” They prescribed a hardcore propaganda and marketing campaign that utilized depth psychology. It’s classic thought reform, which can be applied to get people to believe anything, no matter how implausible.

Their prescription was to first de-sensitize the public. Then to “jam” or suppress every word of dissent. Finally, everyone must convert. This cultivates a conditioned population. Once we are conditioned in this manner, we end up accepting agendas and programs that we’d at least question if our society respected clear and free thinking. Instead, people either self-censor or conform to the party line out of hope for social acceptance.

Representative government requires citizens to be able to openly discuss social questions among themselves.

That’s how it works in places like North Korea, anyway. We’re getting there, thanks to purveyors of censorship under the guise of “non-discrimination.” It’s entirely opposite to how American-style government is supposed to work. Representative government requires the citizens, who are themselves the source of our government’s authority, to be able to openly discuss social questions among themselves and consequently direct their representatives.

If we are afraid or taught not to speak, representative government cannot happen. Tiny factions like the LGBT lobby wield power over an unwilling populace, which breeds resentment against government for not aligning with our priorities. Political correctness therefore eviscerates government by consent; under it, government operates based on brute force, which escalates public disapproval in a constant cycle until the social repression is broken—sometimes with (God forbid) violence.

What Happens Next?

The great irony of the gay rights agenda is that, ultimately, it’s not about gay rights or transgender rights. They always follow censorship with further centralized power in the state.

This stunts our growth because it causes people to become more polarized and fearful about sharing perspectives.

Using law to suppress free speech in the name of equality is characteristic of the urge to use centralized state power to promote unique and, frankly, warped agendas. This sort of equality requires having resentments to cultivate and victims to exploit—and state power that “protects” said victims by suppressing all opposing points of view.

The risks inherent in this are deep and frightening. State power feeds on itself. Lenin exploited workers and Mao exploited the peasants, all in the guise of being their “vanguard” and giving them equality. Anyone at the HRC who truly loves freedom will come to rue the day it yielded to the urge to use state power to suppress free expression in the name of equality for gays and transgenders.

This latest attack against the First Amendment is unquestionably another act of war against freedom of conscience and expression. That makes it a campaign against human rights. By killing freedom of religion and speech, it also kills freedom of association. It stunts our growth because it causes people to become more polarized and fearful about sharing perspectives. That’s perfect for a centralized surveillance state. But it’s tragic for true human friendship and love.

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist, and Joy Pullmann is The Federalist's managing editor.